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All Talk: How Chatbots And AI Will Transform The Way We Do Business

Ben Lee is the founder and CEO at Neon Roots, a digital development agency.

These days, all investors want to talk about is artificial intelligence. AI is creeping its way into more and more aspects of the business world and daily life, and global funding for AI-based startups grew some 60% from 2015 to 2016. Many people in Silicon Valley -- some investors included -- don’t even understand how AI works. But if they don’t see it in your business plan, you’re not getting their money.

While this may seem like another investor fad, there’s plenty of substance behind the expectation. AI is set to revolutionize nearly every aspect of the modern world. As someone whose company is working on building four new chatbots right now, allow me to say this: If you’re going to stay competitive over the next five to 10 years, you should consider how you can incorporate AI into your business. And I think chatbots are one of the easiest ways to start.

What Is A Chatbot?

Chatbots are essentially programs with a conversational user interface. Instead of clicking buttons to execute the program’s functions, with a chatbot, you type (or say) a command and expect the program to execute it. Chances are, you’ve already seen them or heard of them – Facebook’s M, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are all versions of chatbots. Beyond the larger brand names, there are countless other chatbots covering everything from customer service to checking the weather, and with more than 34,000 new bots built in 2016, they show no signs of slowing down.

Moving The Conversation Forward

On the surface, these chatbots may seem like little more than novelty toys. Sure, it’s fun to ask a bot to check the weather, but isn’t it just as easy to open an app on your phone? Make no mistake, though: Chatbots are set to cause major disruption in a variety of industries.

Thanks to their ability to process language, chatbots already have the potential to handle tasks like data entry, scheduling and other basic assistant-like tasks. Companies like X.ai and Clara Labs are already creating email-based bots to make manually scheduling meetings a thing of the past. Outside of minutia, chatbots have the potential to massively change areas like customer service, and they may even shine in the medical industry by helping patients schedule appointments or aiding in the early stages of diagnosis.

More Than Just Function

But more than that, chatbots are powerful because they provide the most natural user interface of all: language. Chatbots free the user to define their own interface, removing the constraints of buttons and pixels on a screen and letting users voice their questions and interests in their own words.

Plus, talking to a bot – even if we know it’s a bot – is just more enjoyable. According to Tari Weiss, who I've worked with on building a chatbot to act as a reminder system across multiple devices and platforms, the chatbots that succeed are the ones that truly engage us.

“Look, nobody believes it’s human,” says Tari. “But the bot needs to have a certain character, a persona, a sensitivity that conveys a narrative. We spend a lot of time trying to build something that someone wants to spend time with.”

While it may seem trivial, the human element of talking to a bot – even if it isn’t truly human – is an important advantage.

From a practical standpoint, chatbots are a great entryway into AI because they’re versatile, powerful, and cheap to build. Building a simple chatbot requires minimal development work, and because the bot is completely text-based, it’s platform agnostic: Ultimately, it’ll work the same on any text-based messaging service. Plus, there’s an ideal testing ground that you’re probably already using at your business – Slack.

Nearly everyone I know uses Slack, and building a chatbot by starting with a Slack app makes it easy to obtain proof of concept with minimal development and design effort. This also gives a simple, clear release hierarchy for moving from MVP to full product: Start with Slack, then launch on Facebook Messenger, then SMS, and then a native micro-app. It beats developing a full native application because the bot is housed in a messaging app that people already use on a daily basis, and launching this way provides a pre-built roadmap and release hierarchy.

Building Bots For The Future

In the end, I think bots will be an absolutely necessary part of running a business. As the language processing and conversational abilities of bots grow, they’ll be able to handle more complex tasks, have more natural conversations with people, and show up in more areas of daily life. But the real reason for building a bot isn’t to talk to your customers – it’s to talk to your customers’ bots.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, M and bots like them are all attempts at a “master bot,” or an intelligent personal assistant – a bot capable of decoding natural human speech, deciphering the intent behind the speech intuitively, and controlling other programs, apps and bots to execute on that intent. That’s the key: The endgame in all this is for bots to control other bots.

Building a bot for your business now is setting yourself up for success in the future. When Siri finally gets powerful enough, customers will be using it to do everything from scheduling calendar appointments to ordering Thai food with the coupon they just clipped. If your business already has a bot that’s ready to be integrated with Siri, you’ll be ahead of the curve.

At some point in the future, doing a Google search may seem like an archaic research project because everything will be taken care of by bots talking to bots. To adapt fast enough and stay competitive when that point comes, consider implementing AI into your business now – and bots are a practical way to do just that.